Something Special from the land of the rising sun... a King Seiko Special!

hello everyone welcome back to the channel today we have something special a king psycho special from 1975 actually the last version of king cycle that was ever made so without further ado let's get going let's first check all the functions it does run but now the hack has stopped the seconds hand we see that the date changes the weekday changes let's try the quick set the week they quick set this as expected but the date quick set actually winds the watch while you change the date so that's a bit odd we see the time graph is actually quite okay parallel lines not too crazy a little bit low amplitude but that's fine not too bad be there right so yeah just probably needs a service so let's get to it given that the king's psycho was a bit of a competitor with a grand cycle they both typically came with gold medallions in the back but this version has a pretty plain back the rotor is just screwed on rather unceremoniously but it works it's ball bearing rotors that's a good thing we can just use our tweezers no need for any special tools here get the space ring out and take the crown out and then we can uncase the movement it is beneficial to take the rotor off first because then the movement will lie a little bit flatter and if you want to put it in movement holder it's also easier without the rotor all right we see that the dial is in very nice condition let's then just align the hands so we can take them off with the levers and the dial has a bit of an interesting mechanism as well what you would find in old watches are these dog screws that sort of cut into the dial feet and that is the same kind of thing you have here but then again etta started doing more or less the same thing with their clips so it's a little bit in between all the new let's get the dial off and place it safely and the spacering let's also put that together with the dial and there's a c-clip holding the weekday disc in place let's just take that one off without losing it it's also a pingable object with a weak disc off we can start studying what's happening on the dial side of the movement now first thing to notice is that this movement has a rocker but also a sliding pinion the quick date setting looks quite normal but then as mentioned when we set the date we actually wind the watch at the same time which is a bit odd and then we have the regular hand setting we have one wheel with two fingers for both date and weekday and another thing that's really striking is the finish or the lack of finish that is really a psycho thing as well there's no real finish to things it's just you know finished in the machining but then i put on this uh sort of random gold screws to i don't know maybe make it nicer so we take off this flaky little plates and then see what's underneath there's one of those gold screws better keep that one so someone made this joke that if you have a patek philippe and you take away the finishing what you're left with a psycho and it's a little bit true of course that psychos are very unceremonious in terms of the finishing but they are highly functional on this watch they see pretty much the only finishing of any mention is on this three-quarter bridge by the way we need to take off the automatic module or at least break the chain before we can run down the mainspring so let's do that first we can turn it over again and unwind the mainspring now to wind down the main spring we're actually going to use a screwdriver on the screw and that's all right even though we would normally use the crown but the crown is connected through this rocker and the rocker is held down by these plates which we just took off of course that's why the cutout in the plate is there in the first place so we could use the crown but anyway it's fine to use the screwdriver like this let's take off the ratchet screw and the ratchet wheel now we have this nice long click there another thing that also sort of characterizes cycles is the number of parts that manage to squeeze into the keyless works if let's say a simple watch has maybe a little bit over 100 parts screws included then a psycho has maybe 250 parts only in the keyless works so i'm of course exaggerating a little bit it's probably more like 240 give or take on average now since we're rambling on about cycle let's just get the last two off the chest as well uh one is plastic parts which were actually spared for in this watch and the other is the exaggerated amount of jewels that they put in some of these movements we mentioned in the longines 341 video that there are actually five ruby balls in the ball bearings that they didn't count in the jewel count but some cycles have these random jewels here and there and then they all of a sudden have like 35 joules which doesn't really do anything except maybe increase import costs here and there now we started taking off some of the keyless works take off the data lever then we can take off the rocker and there's a little wig wag underneath the rocker as well that meshes with a ratchet wheel i'm not sure why they did it this way doesn't really make a lot of sense it doesn't add a lot of functionality it doesn't reduce manufacturing costs rather the opposite it certainly increases uh fragility when you have a lot of small parts that need to work together to achieve simple things like winding the watch but it is a fun move very different from your boilerplate oh my gosh that's for sure and please don't get me wrong vintage cycles are fantastic watches the king cycle the ground cycle the lord matic there's a lot of things to love about old cycles and new ones also and you typically get a lot more for the money than buying a vintage cycle and buying a let's say vintage rolex or vintage omega and these watches are just as good if not better now meanwhile we come to the keyless works started taking off the different pieces here actually almost finished that's how time flies when you ramble on now you might also think huh why take everything off on the dial well the thing is we don't really have too much use of the crown anymore because of the way it's constructed so we can just take everything off and then go to the train side now if anything the train side is much more conventional it has a pretty big sort of three-quarter plate instead of let's say le pin bridges and it does not use the psycho magic lever for some reason it's more of a conventional reverser wheel that we already took out and it also has a few extra jewels you see these capsules on the scape wheel and the fourth wheel is really not necessary let's check that the wheels have the right handshake inside shake don't really expect there to be a lot of problems given that watch was running fine comparatively so let's just unscrew everything and see what's hiding underneath and as mentioned before when you're working on a new movement it's very important to take a lot of pictures make sure that you know how things go back my habit ever since i began was to put the screws and the parts that belong together in one compartment in the tray the screws don't go in the cleaner anyway so then when the parts come out of the cleaner we know the screws are matching the parts one interesting thing here is that we see this long tension spring for the seconds pinion it actually goes over the third wheel and if this one is not properly adjusted it might even slow down or break down the third wheel so that's a lookout point also look a point that it doesn't clamp too hard down on the seconds pinion now under this little center wheel bridge we have the hack the hack is actually a really big piece for some reason it's again a little bit over thought over engineered it works but it's also known to be a little bit fragile and another trademark of cycles of course is riveted wheels everywhere not to say anything bad about riveted wheels but riveted wheels are bad let's not ping this spring either and here comes the hack well that pretty much completes it there's a little bit rust there in the barrel cut out we can just rub that off with some peg wood right away otherwise the movement looks very nice well relatively speaking obviously as nice as the psycho movement looks without any finishing of any mention yeah but the machine finished cutting but on the serious side if psycho had spent as much time on finishing us behind the swiss brands then of course the price would have been a completely different one as well because the finishing costs a lot of money that's a lot of handwork with people sitting there and making purlage and kotoshanev or what have you so i would rather have a great movement of high quality and then pay a nice small sum for it rather than paying a hundred times as much for the same quality basically that's just finished to a very high degree so that's what's good about psycho all right let's put the balance back on let's take the chat on and then stone out and this is a kiff style thing so we have to turn it a little bit more fiddly but not too bad do the same on the dial side and then we're ready to put pretty much everything into the cleaner we just need to also look at the barrel to get the main spring out and clean that one as well looks pretty dirty and dry and we see the main spring has a kink in it so we're gonna have to replace it four vintage swatches it's not necessarily what you always want to do replacing the mainspring i mean for the reason that a new mainspring might be a little bit too strong in a sense it will create a lot more wear in the wheels and pinions and to be honest you don't really need 315 degrees amplitude on the vintage watch anyway it's not like people wear a vintage watch to have it run within plus four minus one seconds let's just finish up cleaning the barrel and then we get all the different parts in our tray and get it ready for the cleaner and voila strip down complete all right we got everything back from the cleaning machine let's start by having a look at the rotor which has some aging spots on the metal trying to actually rub it off with a normal eraser which often helps but not here and we don't want to damage this so we're going to be very careful with this fiberglass brush and just see how much you can get off with some different solutions but it's not going to be ideal but it looks pretty good in real life actually then we remember that the main spring was kinked so we'll have to put in a new mainspring and when looking at mainspring there are a few different dimensions we're looking at the main being the height the thickness and the length of the mainspring so i found a main spring that has the right dimensions apart from being two centimeters too short and that's fine when putting it in you might see that the mainspring is actually upside down and the reason for that is that psycho and basically non-european brands typically have the mainspring going in clockwise whereas the swiss and most european brands have it going in anti-clockwise worth to remember putting in the barrel arbor giving it a little bit of oil and then we can put the lid back on another thing we have to do before we can start screwing things together or screwing them up a bit depending is to oil the end stones for the shock settings now you might remember that this movement actually has end stones on a couple of other wheels as well those were gonna oil from the underside so we're not going to dismantle them and when you're doing so you can either use the finest oiler you have or ideally the automatic oiler perhaps from bergeon so we can put those back in and then we can look at the train bridge as you might remember it's a three-quarter bridge for this movement and there are two end stones that we want to oil here also so we'll just do that from the underside if you have an automatic oiler that will help a little bit but it's not a big deal and then we oil the same corresponding handstones from the inside if you will also on the main plate all right then we can start putting this baby back together our plan for assembly is basically to build the tray inside first and then we'll put on the keyless works whole 240 parts there plus a few other components on the dial side given the construction of the watch now talking about the construction of the watch i've gotten a lot of heat for saying that it has a rocker mechanism on the downside for the winding and i sort of hear you say hey a lot of heat dude you got like five views on this and i'm sure one of them is yourself sitting in your little white office offering sacrifice to the porcelain gods so how can you get a lot of heat well to that i can only respond at the first point yes absolutely and the second point oh child how much you yet have to learn about the ways of the humans you see when you get married you first of all you marry of course this beautiful innocent girl but there's a transformation happening in the marriage and we're not talking about let's say like the aging of a nice wine we're talking more kafka that beautiful girl that you married she will turn into this vicious vindictive wraith living only to tear you down every second of the day including when you sleep even if you might not know about it and of course one of the viewers of the video is my beautiful wife and she correctly pointed out to me that why do you call that a rocker it's not a rocker it's a minute wheel bridge with intermediate wheel for day correction part 387006 how many times do i have to tell you uh yes dear i said but it's sort of rock no it's not rockery yeah but it's a little bit rocker-like see no it's a bridge it has two screws and she was right of course as she always is anyway we put the train bridge back on we make sure it's aligned with the pivots in the holes and it's a good practice to keep a probe or something on top of it to hold it in place because if those pivots get out of the hole so we would then screw down we're going to break the pivots and that's going to be quite expensive finding new parts for a 50 60 year old movement is probably going to cost you like 50 dollars just for a little wheel it's a better safe than sorry i put the crown and stem back in as well just to make sure that the hack stays out of the way which it should anyway but still next we'll put in the pallet fork and a pallet for so in english we separate between having one screw and bridges having and more than one screw in french is all bridges all right so we're over at the dial side just pull the crown and stem back out again first before we start assembling things i'll put on the click spring first and then we can put on the ratchet wheel and screw it down remember this little spring for the wigwag pinion underneath the ratchet wheel now the ratchet wheels on these cycles also have this little bit cheap feeling because it's not a square hole as in most other watches only two of the four sides are parallel it still works just feels a little bit cheaper and this is the left handed screw as indicated by these parallel stripes on top of the screw head give it a little bit extra wind then we can turn the watch over and see that the pallet fork switches nicely from side to side so given the way this movement is constructed we do have to flip it over a few extra times but that's just how it is doesn't take many seconds 20 20. all right before we start putting the rest of the stuff back on let's put some d5 or similar on the different posts to make sure we get as little friction as possible it's quite common to have an oil sink underneath the minute wheel so we'll have to oil that before we put the minute wheel on and for this movement there are also a couple oil sinks for the automatic wheels that are under the date driver wheel so that also determines some of the sequencing of things okay so let's put some grease on a winding pinion and a sliding pinion so we can put the stem and crown back in and then we can commence where the rest of the keyless works it's a good idea to put in the cannon pinion before you put on the minute wheel for this watch you have to do it but in general it's also a good idea it really is a strangely designed movement in a lot of ways on one hand you have nice long springs like the click spring like the yolk spring but then you also have these sheet metal cutouts and these weirdly overlapping things that psycho loves to do and of course you have this random gold screws for some reason but it is more fun to work on different movements and this movement really is different in a lot of ways all right so we put on the setting lever spring put some grease on that one so it slides a little bit better also very uncommon that we put the hour wheel on before we put on the rest of the achilles works but yeah the wig wag and the minute bridge yes and we can then put on what actually is the rocker it's the day-date corrector wheel rocker and then we'll put on the date jumper and then the cover plate now as we mentioned in the strip down video the minute will bridge has to be kept in place to make sure that winding and so forth can take place properly and it's held in place by those two cover plates but given that we're not putting those on quite yet we're going to simply put in the screws there just to hold the minute wheel bridge down while we do the rest of the stuff on the train side so this is a movement that does require a bit more planning and sequencing than normal movements if you will and if you do this more regularly and of course you probably can find better ways of doing it than i have and it's not a very common movement so it's not like you're gonna work on it every day or every week or every month or every year or every lifespan but it is a series of movements uh the 5206 arm that carries a lot of the same characteristics alright so we flipped the movement over put the balance wheel in and it started ticking so that's always good now let's try to see if we can get this baby running properly firstly magnetize the movement always a good habit and then we'll put it on the time grapher now you might remember from the script down that the time graph was actually pretty good and it's still pretty okay here one thing i did notice when i was working on this is that there was a small couple of kinks actually in the hairspring very small kinks so not like they're really going to impact the time keeping but they may make the graph look a little bit rougher so when we're adjusting the watch on time graph for now the first thing we want to do is take out the beat error we're just going to speed up the video a little bit but you should see the beat error being reduced and once that is reduced we can start putting the watch at the proper rate now the amplitude is still a bit low at this point and that's fine we didn't fully wind it and we also have to put in the automatic works and that always adds a little bit extra so we're seeing the beat there is gone now now we just want to make sure we have a pretty good rate just get it around level and we should be fine for now we'll do a little bit more adjustment after the watch is assembled encased all right starting to look pretty okay yeah now we can take it off then we'll put on the automatic wheels the intermediate wheel as well as the reverser wheel feed liquidly then we can put the little bridge back on as always we'll make sure that the pivots are in the holes that the wheels run freely and of course that the reverser wheel does reverse the bi-directional movement of the rotor into one direction winding all right then we can oil those two wheels as well and that means we're pretty much finished on the train side so let's flip again and then we can oil those two automatic wheels before we put on the date wheel driver with the two fingers all right then we're getting that wheel in place with intermediate wheel i also want to oil this date finger so that the finger can rotate smoothly on that little shim that is then screwed down and testing then we can unscrew them and it will bridge again and complete the rest of the calendar works now in the strypton video i did rant quite a lot about uh psycho movements with the plastic pieces with his cheapo stamped out sheet metal plates with his random gold screws and so forth but psycho is really good quality even though they have some quirks and some strange decisions and they do just work basically and especially the king psycho and grand psycho from the old days but also the lord marvel automatic what have you very very good watches and if maintained properly they will keep running for 100 years not on one wind but you know what i mean so putting on the two cover plates remember the gold screws and let's check that quick date setting works let's check that the manual setting works actually one little uh good point i would say is that they have these two fingers for the date and for the day apart which means that the mechanism doesn't have to cope with changing those two at the same time as is possible with a lot of day-date movements so that does spread out the burden on the mainspring a little bit we're also oiling the data jumper with a tiny little blob of d5 or hp 1300 and then we can put on a weekday disc you might have seen that we actually also did oil the jumper for this one very very lightly testing time again all right so we're getting closer to casing the watch put on the spacer ring for the dial and the dial itself one thing i didn't properly record was putting the hands on but we have shown that in other videos and we'll show it in further videos down the line you just have to trust that we actually did it but before starting to put the hands on we want to check that the quick set works still there are sometimes issues when you put the dial on especially if there is no spacer for the dial so the hour hand is on now we want to double check that we aligned it well so that the date changes at midnight and then for this movement and most movements we want to have the day change a little bit later but the date should be around midnight max 15 minutes earlier or later but ideally of course spot on but let's say five minutes to and fro same with a minute hand we're also checking that the hands are parallel to the dial and not rubbing and here we go that was like seven eight minutes uh before but that is with uh moving the hands with the crown and when the mechanism runs by itself it will be a couple of minutes later so that should still be within five minutes so that's fine seconds hand on and the watch is still ticking for the case we didn't really do anything to it other than clean it it is very sharp and nice we don't want to polish the case if we don't have to in this case does look very nice and better in person than on camera but it's still sharp and nice and doesn't look like it has been polished much at all last things we do we put in the spacer ring and then we screw down the rotor and given that it's a ball bearing we're also going to oil it with a lubette v106 so and the last thing we have to do now before putting the case back on and the straps on is to check the time grapher we remember that the amplitude was a bit low so we wound it a little bit more and also with the automatic movement you always get a little bit more uh amplitude and for this watch we're going to be happy with around 260. all right let's put the case back on we have a nice black strap that we're going to put in the watch and the end result is not too bad if i may say so king psycho special with the 5256a movement handsome watch and that means we're finished with this lovely king psycho special we'll be back shortly until then tata you

Channel: Vintage Watch Services

Views: 3,187

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: vintage watches, watch repair, watch servicing, mechanical watch, old watch, vintage watch, horology, watchmaker, watch services, watch restoration, watchmaking, old Seiko, Seiko watch, King Seiko Special, King Seiko, king seiko hi beat, king seiko 5256 special

Id: pNuqVy12_7s

Length: 39min 43sec (2383 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021